Anywhere but Here

34

They finally realized that they could kill two birds with one stone. They had a lot of velocity to shed, and that would take some time, so they hunted down a nearby star and found a gas giant planet whose gravity they could use to bring them back into the same ballpark as the local stars. They had plenty of time to look at the nebulae while they let the planet do its thing. It was even better with binoculars. The gas clouds held detail that you couldn’t see by naked eye; folds and filaments and subtle variations of color on every scale.

At last the navigation program told them that they were moving at roughly the same velocity as the gas giant, so Trent aimed the pickup away from Orion and Donna set the distance for 1,500 light-years. They jumped, and Trent didn’t even have time to turn them around again so the computer could get a look at behind them before it flashed the “locked on” message on the screen. It had obviously recognized something else.

“Woo hoo!” Donna yelled. “We’re home free.”

Trent flipped the truck over anyway. Maybe the computer didn’t need to see Orion, but he did.

There it was, glittering just the way he remembered it. Bright as hell, even this far away. He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling days of tension flow out of him with the air. “Man, that’s a sight to behold.”

“It is.”

He pulled his eyes away from it and looked over at Donna. “I’ve been thinking about where to go when we got back to familiar territory, and I’m wondering if Galactic Federation headquarters might not be the smartest bet.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Earth has a nasty habit of shootin’ at people who drop in uninvited, and we’ve only got one parachute left.”

“That’s a good point. You think we could get another one from the Feds?”

“Probably. I wouldn’t mind talking to Allen and Judy about what to do once we get home, either. They might have a better idea than I do.”

“They might.” Donna pulled up the destination menu and found “Gal. Fed. HQ” on the list. When she selected it, all the stats popped into place in the target window.

“It’s only eighty light-years away,” she said. “Practically in our back yard.”

“Everything on that list is practically in our back yard compared to where we’ve been,” said Trent. He looked at the computer and saw the red arrow pointing straight up, so he used the rear jets to tilt the truck upward until the targeting circle started sliding down the screen. He stopped their motion when it was as close to dead center as he could get, and said, “Okay, let’s see if this damned program will take us there.”

Donna hit “enter,” but instead of the familiar shift of stars and light disorientation of a short jump, they felt the major lurch of a big jump and the stars completely changed.

“Son of a bitch,” Trent said. “It did it again.”

“It did.” Donna swallowed hard. “I’m starting to take this kind of personally.”

“Me too. Let’s get us turned around and head right back.” They had to do the edge-of-the-map trick again to find the opposite direction of where they were pointed, but Trent had been careful to note the exact star that had traded places with the targeting circle on the computer screen, so they were able to get a pretty good one-eighty from that. They set the targeting circle on their reverse course and set the distance for 20,000 light-years, and Donna hit the button.

Another big jump, and all the stars changed. The computer didn’t get a quick lock this time, but when Trent set the pickup spinning slowly, he picked up Orion just about the same time the computer did. The constellation was squashed quite a bit head-to-toe, which meant they were a long ways to the north or south of where they had started, but the computer claimed it knew where they were.

“Federation headquarters is now three hundred and thirty-two light-years away,” Donna reported. “I’m setting up this jump in explorer mode.”

“Good idea.”

She copied the distance figure and the coordinates from the automatic targeting window, double-checked to make sure she’d typed everything right, and hit “enter.” The stars did a pretty good shift this time, but a few of them stayed put, and one off to the right was close enough to show a disk.

“That looks promising,” she said. “Let’s triangulate.” She set up another jump of just a few light-hours. When she hit “enter” the star shifted quite a ways behind them, and the computer popped up a window with its position and distance. “Okay, we’ve got a lock, and it claims it knows where Gal. Fed. is in its orbit. I’m setting that up in explorer mode, too… and here we go.” She hit the button, and the star became a bright sun. And off in the distance, a winking light drew their eyes toward a space station.

It was a long, flattened-football-shaped thing, with stuff sticking out of it at all angles. It looked a little like a pile of scrap metal, but Trent had seen pictures of it in magazines, and he knew that some of those booms were over a mile long, and the whole body was at least fifteen miles from end to end. It was impressive as hell, fitting for a seat of government. It was also receding at several thousand miles an hour.

“Looks like we’re in for a long vector translation,” Trent said. “Let’s at least let them know we’re here first, and find out where to go.” He turned on the radio and switched to channel 19. He didn’t hear any traffic, so he keyed the microphone and said, “Break one-nine for anybody at Galactic Federation headquarters. This is Trent Stinson requesting permission to come aboard.”

He let off the button and waited a few seconds, and a voice responded, “Welcome, Trentstinson. You are welcome to come aboard, but please don’t attempt the docking yourself. Too many pilots have miscalculated, with unfortunate results. If you’ll shift to channel twenty-nine and transmit a ten-second signal, we will locate you and send a tug out to get you.”

“Hot damn,” Trent said to Donna. “Valet service.” He keyed the microphone and said, “That sounds good to me. Shifting to twenty-nine.” He tuned up ten channels and said, “Trent Stinson on channel twenty-nine, saying sure, come get us. We’ve had more than our share of trouble with this damned navigation program anyway. It took us twenty thousand light-years out of our way, and we spent damned near a week tryin’ to figure out how to get back home. We’d love a ride in.” He let off the microphone and asked Donna, “Was that ten seconds?”

“I think—”

“We have your position,” the voice responded, “and we’re sending the tug now. It’ll take us a few minutes to match your velocity. In the meantime, if you’ll tell us your species, we’ll determine which part of the station to take you to.”

“We’re human,” Trent said. “From Earth,” he added, somewhat reluctantly.

There was a pause, then, “You are Trent Stinson, of Rock Springs, Wyoming?”

Trent raised an eyebrow. Donna smiled and said, “You’re famous.”

“Infamous, more likely,” Trent said. He keyed the microphone and said, “That’s me. Do I know you?”

“You know part of me,” said the voice. “Several of my units once belonged to the being you knew as Tippet.”

Tippet was the alien butterfly that Allen and Judy had met on their first trip, who had turned out to be just one member of a vast hive mind on board an interstellar starship. Tippets were all more or less interchangeable units in the same being, so talking to any of them was like talking to them all. Trent and Donna had met the original on their last trip into space, and they had gotten along famously, after the initial exchange of death threats.

“Well hells bells,” Trent said, “Howdy, old buddy! How’ve you been?”

“Divided,” said the alien. “Tippet’s experience was too valuable to keep to itself, so it shared half of its members with other hives. I am mostly Potikik, a governor hive from our home planet, but I have Tippet’s memories and some of its temperament now. I remember meeting you aboard Tippet’s ship several months ago. Are you still travelling in the same red pickup?”

Trent laughed. “Yep. It’s a little worse for wear these days, but it’s the same one. Are Judy and Allen still hanging out with you guys?”

“They’re here,” said Potikik. “They’ll no doubt want to see you, but their time is limited. They have no extra units to divide their labor, and running the galaxy is hard work.”

“No doubt. I apologize in advance, but I’m afraid we’re going to make that job even harder.”

“Oh? In what way?”

“I don’t know if you realize what the United States is up to, but they’re bombing the shit out of anybody they don’t agree with, and generally making life unpleasant for everybody else. We’ve got to put a stop to that.”

“Ah, yes. Human internal politics. I’m sure they would be happy to discuss it with you.” There was a crackle, then the same voice said, “This is your transfer pilot. Please disengage your hyperdrive engine and refrain from maneuvering while I adjust your velocity for docking.”

Trent saw a flicker of motion out his side window and turned to see a spherical framework of metal beams just a few dozen feet away. It was maybe five feet across, with six arms and six big bell-shaped rocket nozzles evenly spaced around its surface. It drifted closer, and one of the arms reached out and the grapple at its end closed around the roll bar just behind the cab. Trent could see a little glass bubble about the size of a softball in the middle of the framework, with an iridescent blue butterfly floating in its midst, its legs manipulating tiny control levers. Potikik, or one of its hive-mates.

Donna quit the navigation program and unplugged the hyperdrive connector from the back of the computer.

“We’re ready,” Trent said through the radio.

There was a brief moment of disorientation, and they popped out close to a gas giant planet. It was icy blue and dimly lit. Where the sun had been a moment ago, now just a bright star glowed.

“Long ways to go for a vector translation,” Trent said.

The butterfly didn’t reply for a second, but then it said, “Excuse my delay. My mind needs a moment to reset itself after a hyperspace jump, and now that we are away from the hive, my higher functions are mostly artificial. But in answer to your implied question, we have no planets closer in. They have all been eaten by the space stations.”

“Eaten?” Trent wondered if it was his turn to reset his brain, because he couldn’t have heard that right.

“The stations are biological,” said the butterfly. “Engineered, we believe, by a civilization long gone, but they are self-sustaining. They live on sunlight and reproduce by feeding on any matter they encounter. They long ago filled this solar system as far out as sunlight would power them.”

“Oh.”

Donna said, “There must be a hell of a lot of them, if they ate the planets.”

“How many of these space stations are there?” Trent asked their tug pilot.

“Millions,” the butterfly replied.

“All just waiting for people to come live in ’em?”

“Who knows their purpose? But we have colonized several without incident.”

“Huh. They’ve got breathable air in ’em and everything?”

“We import it. We’ve pressurized different sections with different mixtures for different species.”

It was mind-boggling. Millions of space stations, just waiting for anybody who came along. Somebody was thinking ahead.

They fell outward from the gas giant for another couple of minutes, then their pilot said, “Translation will be complete in ten seconds,” and ten seconds later they jumped to within spitting distance of Federation Headquarters.

The station did look organic up close. The long booms visible from a distance looked more rounded, with habitat modules sticking out like mushrooms from their surfaces, and long vine-like tubes connecting them. The core of the station was lumpy and peppered with round ports and windows, like eyes peering out through holes in a blanket.

The tug pilot fired one of his attitude jets and the pickup swung around until the station was to their right, then he tired another jet and they felt the thrust pushing them sideways toward it. It grew bigger and bigger, one of the huge booms sweeping past only a few hundred feet away, until a tiny black dot became a yawning cavern mouth.

“If I see teeth in there, I’m hitting the bugout button,” Donna said.

“You’re not hooked up,” Trent pointed out.

She gave him the look, but spared him the words.

The tug pilot spun the pickup partway around and corrected their approach, then spun them around the rest of the way and slowed them down so they drifted into the docking bay at just a few feet per second. It was an oddly shaped chamber, almost rectangular but with walls that bulged inward in the middle. Glowing circles in the walls provided illumination when the door irised closed behind them, then air rushed in to fill the vacuum and the walls straightened out.

The tug pilot reoriented the pickup so its wheels were near one of the walls, then reached out with two arms and gripped protruding knobs in the adjacent wall, holding the pickup in place. “It’s safe to exit,” he said.

Trent popped his door latches, but the door wouldn’t budge. There was more pressure outside than in. He opened the valve in his door and it hissed for a few seconds, and then he was able to open the door.

The air was warm, and rich with the smells of life. Not unpleasantly so, but you could tell that people—and lots of other creatures, too—lived here. Trent and Donna pushed themselves out of the cab and gripped the sides of the pickup to keep from drifting away, and their tug pilot popped open his control bubble and flew out to hover next to his craft. Without the radio, Trent wasn’t sure how to communicate with him, but a voice spoke from the side of the tugboat: “These mobile transceivers will allow you to hear us, and we you. They also allow us to function as translators for beings who don’t speak English. Please take one and strap it to a convenient body part.”

Trent heard Donna trying to suppress a giggle. He just smiled and said, “Okay.” There were four little gray boxes about the size of matchbooks clipped to the framework next to the alien; he pulled loose two of them and reached across the top of the truck to hand one to Donna. The strap was an inch-wide piece of black nylon long enough to go around his thigh if he’d wanted to put it there, but he decided on his upper arm instead.

“How’s that?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” the speaker replied. The butterfly flapped its wings and the speaker said, “If you will follow me, then, I’ll give you the tour.”

Trent and Donna pulled themselves around to the front of the pickup and were about to push off after the butterfly when a slit in the docking bay’s inner wall spread apart and Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher floated through.

“Trent! Donna!” Judy yelled, and she launched herself toward them, her arms held out wide.